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John Carmack's arguments against building a custom XR OS at Meta

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Re: John Carmack's arguments against building a custom XR OS at Meta

#331

Post by kranke155 »

markus_zhang wrote: post #161
Aurornis wrote: post #133

> They also got me reported to HR by the manager of the XROS effort for supposedly making his team members feel bad I've only seen John Carmack's public interactions, but they've all been professional and kind. It's depressing to imagine HR getting involved because someone's feelings had been hurt by an objective discussion from a person like John Carmack. I'm having flashbacks to the times in my career when coworker…

I have mixed feelings about this. In one part, JC is someone I look up to, at least from the perspective of engineering. On the other hand, putting myself in the shoes in someone who got the once in life chance to build a new OS with corp support for a new shiny device…I for hell would want to do this.

If you want to do it you should be able to defend it against contrarian arguments that it’s a waste of time and company resources.

Re: John Carmack's arguments against building a custom XR OS at Meta

#332

Post by kranke155 »

WD-42 wrote: post #189
markus_zhang wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have mixed feelings about this. In one part, JC is someone I look up to, at least from the perspective of engineering. On the other hand, putting myself in the shoes in someone who got the once in life chance to build a new OS with corp support for a new shiny device…I for hell would want to do this.

Exactly! It seems very narc-y. Just let me build my cool waste of company resources, it's not like Zucky is going to notice, he's too busy building his 11 homes. Imagine being able to build an operating system, basically the end-game of being a programmer, and get PAID for it. Then some nerd tells on you.

Carmack saw it as a waste of time. Is this really what we are doing now? Justifying that my waste of company resources is no less inefficient than the others?

Re: John Carmack's arguments against building a custom XR OS at Meta

#333

Post by terribleperson »

jamra wrote: post #202
Aurornis wrote: post #133

> They also got me reported to HR by the manager of the XROS effort for supposedly making his team members feel bad I've only seen John Carmack's public interactions, but they've all been professional and kind. It's depressing to imagine HR getting involved because someone's feelings had been hurt by an objective discussion from a person like John Carmack. I'm having flashbacks to the times in my career when coworker…

I followed his posts internally before he left. He was strict about resource waste. Hand tracking would break constantly and he brought metrics to his posts. His whole point was that Apple has hardware nailed down and it’ll be efficient software that will be the differentiator. The bloat at Meta was the result of empire building.

The software for the Quest 3 is unreliable and breaks often. A team that attacks attempts to hold them accountable makes a lot of sense.

Re: John Carmack's arguments against building a custom XR OS at Meta

#334

Post by kranke155 »

gmueckl wrote: post #238
1718627440 wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not when this is his personal opinion he thought nothing should follow from. "I think that your team shouldn't even exist" doesn't mean "I want your team to no longer exist.".

But the name Carmack carries some clout and people listen to him (too) closely because of his reputation alone. This is soft power that automatically comes with responsibility.

Yes and he used it to try and stop something he saw as a total waste.

Re: John Carmack's arguments against building a custom XR OS at Meta

#336

Post by Tostino »

dedup-com wrote: post #261
gafferongames wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine being a meta engineer and not taking Carmack's advice seriously. Why the fuck is he even hired there if you are not going to listen to him. Dude has forgotten more things about game development than you will ever know...

There were quite a few of high-caliber individuals with equally impressive resumes in the organization to match Carmack's wisdom and ego.

The metaverse has really showcased that.

They finally have feet now, right?

Only light fun. I'm just a little perplexed at their progress and direction over the past 7-8 years. I don't understand how they can have so many high caliber people and put out...that.

Re: John Carmack's arguments against building a custom XR OS at Meta

#337

Post by raggi »

surajrmal wrote: post #312
nashashmi wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wasn’t Fuchsia supposed to be a platform where different OS could run in a virtual environment and software packages would be complete containers? Was not this a new way of tackling the ancient OS problem? These were my imaginations. I thought maybe an OS that could run on the web. Or an OS that could be virtualized to run on several machines. Or an OS that could be run along several other instances on the same machi…

That doesn't sound anything like what fuchsia is or ever was. Fuchsia takes a different set of tradeoffs with respect to baseline primitives and built a new stack of low level user space on top of those new primitives. This gives the software fundamentally different properties which might be better or worse for your use case. For consumer hardware products I think it comes out ahead, but only time will tell.

I think what op was thinking of was early harmonyos, seen people confusing those a lot. Harmony now ofc isn’t what

Re: John Carmack's arguments against building a custom XR OS at Meta

#338

Post by raggi »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #262
dmazzoni wrote: post #236

I was at Google when the Flutter team started building Fuchsia. They had amazing talent. Seriously, some of the most brilliant engineers I've worked with. They had a huge team. Hundreds of people. It was so ambitious. But it seemed like such a terrible idea from the start. Nobody was ever able to articulate who would ever use it. Technically, it was brilliant. But there was no business plan. If they wanted to build a…

Not only did they target Home Hub, they basically forced a rewrite on it (us, I worked on the team). After we already launched. And made our existing workable software stack into legacy. And then they were late. Then late again. And late again. With no consequences. 100% agree with your points. To me watching I was like -- yeah, hell, yeah, working on an OS from scratch sounds awesome, those guys have an awesome job.…

By forced I guess you’re referring to the room full of leads who all said yes, but then reported otherwise back down to their ics to avoid retribution. I caught early wind of this from folks being super rude in early on the ground discussions and tried to raise it with Linus. One of the directors got his kickers in a twist and accused me of making a mountain out of a molehill. I guess clearly not, as the sentiment and division still stands.

Re: John Carmack's arguments against building a custom XR OS at Meta

#339

Post by commandersaki »

dmazzoni wrote: post #236

I was at Google when the Flutter team started building Fuchsia. They had amazing talent. Seriously, some of the most brilliant engineers I've worked with. They had a huge team. Hundreds of people. It was so ambitious. But it seemed like such a terrible idea from the start. Nobody was ever able to articulate who would ever use it. Technically, it was brilliant. But there was no business plan. If they wanted to build a…

I always wonder why companies prefer rolling the dice to pragmatism.

Re: John Carmack's arguments against building a custom XR OS at Meta

#340

Post by raggi »

armchairhacker wrote: post #12

What would be the real advantage of a custom OS over a Linux distribution? The OS does process scheduling, program management, etc. Ok, you don’t want a VR headset to run certain things slowly or crash. But some Linux distributions are battle-tested and stable, and fast, so can’t you write ordinary programs that are fast and reliable (e.g. the camera movement and passthrough use RTLinux and have a failsafe that has b…

For this use case a major one would be better models for carved up shared memory with safe/secure mappings in and out of specialized hardware like the gpu. Android uses binder for this and there are a good number of practical pains with it being shoved into that shape. Some other teams at Google doing similar stuff at least briefly had a path with another kernel module to expose a lot more and it apparently enabled them to fix a lot of problems with contention and so on. So it’s possible to solve this kind of stuff, just painful to be missing the primitives.
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